Formalism and Narratology

Flashcards covering key terms and concepts from the lecture on Formalism and Narratology, including major figures and narrative components.

Formalism

An influential school of literary criticism in Russia (1910s-1930s) that focused on the intrinsic, 'formal' features of a text rather than external factors like the author's biography, history, or social context.

Viktor Shklovsky

Coined the term defamiliarization and argued that art exists to counteract automatized perception by making it more difficult and deliberate.

Defamiliarization

A literary technique that presents common things in an unfamiliar or strange way to renew the reader's perception, making it more difficult and deliberate to 'recover the sensation of life'.

Roman Jakobson

Described the notion of literariness and developed his model of communication and six functions of language.

Vladimir Propp

Developed his 31 functions (narratemes) and morphology of the folktale, inspiring Joseph Campbell.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Developed the ideas of heteroglossia, polyphony, dialogism, chronotope, and carnivalesque.

Polyphony

Refers to a plurality of independent and unmerged voices within a literary text.

Heteroglossia

The diversity of social languages that coexist and compete within a single language.

Dialogism

The idea that all language is inherently dialogic, meaning it is shaped by prior and anticipated speech.

Carnivalesque

A literary mode inspired by medieval carnival traditions, in which normal social rules and hierarchies are subverted through humor and chaos.

Chronotope

The intrinsic connection between temporal and spatial relationships in a narrative.

A.J Greimas

Developed his ideas of the actantial model and the Greimassian Square.

Fredric Jameson

Synthesizes various literary theories into a holistic theory, aiming to map the totality.

Narratology

The study of narrative and narrative structure, focusing on the underlying components and how they influence our perception of a story across various media.

Fabula

Refers to the chronological sequence of events as they occurred, including the characters and setting; it is the 'what' of a narrative.

Syuzhet

Describes how the story is told; it is the narrative's presentation, including the perspective, order of events, and pace (e.g., in medias res).

Focalization

The point of view from which a story is told, explaining the lens through which information is filtered; coined by Gérard Genette.

Internal Focalization

A type of focalization where the audience knows only what a single character knows, common in first-person narratives.

External Focalization

A type of focalization where the narrative focuses only on external actions, withholding the thoughts or feelings of characters, so the audience knows less than the characters.

Zero Focalization

A type of focalization where the 'omniscient narrator' reveals more than any single character knows, accessing the minds and feelings of all characters.